00:28:28.680was co-founded by the former Confederate officer,
00:28:32.680as in, you know, from the deep south of the US,
00:28:37.340Alonzo Slaback and his brother Charles Slaback.
00:28:41.040And, of course, it was created by the town's white male community leaders, and it came a year after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
00:28:51.760So the strike was when black and white railroad workers joined forces across the country in protest of poor pay and working conditions.
00:28:59.960When the strike reached St. Louis, almost 1,500 railroad workers banded together to halt the rail freight for a week because they were demanding the eight-hour workday and a ban on child labor, which of course, you know, was still happening even in the late 1800s.
00:29:16.880The strike ended when 5,000 special police, quote unquote, joined the 3,000 federal troops and forced the strikers to disperse, killing 18 of them in the process.
00:29:30.880So that is the kind of initial goal of the Veiled Profit organization is to take back the public stage from populist demands for social and economic justice.
00:29:42.140and then you know in the parade and the events of it they celebrate st louis's wealthy elite
00:29:51.160so like not great they're like keep child labor you know that's what i'm picturing yeah so you
00:29:59.060know it's not the kkk but the ball has also been held since 1878 and is one of those debutante
00:30:06.240balls for the wealthy elite. So, you know, America has so many institutions and organizations like
00:30:13.060this. You hear examples of them all the time. So is it problematic? Yes. Has the institution
00:30:21.540changed in, you know, more than a hundred years? Probably. But the one thing that we especially
00:30:29.260want to talk about with this subject isn't the issue with this ball, but it's the way the news
00:30:35.760cycle and the internet sped through this discourse so quickly and labeled Ellie the KKK queen1.00
00:30:43.380from seeing this one snippet of a newspaper 22 years ago. Boy is this a big one to get through1.00
00:30:50.780um I found it perplexing because I do kind of want to touch on not really the organization but
00:30:58.640the discourse around whether Ellie is a racist or not because I think that was kind of the
00:31:04.920conversations floating through Twitter what was kind of uncovered is that she comes from a line
00:31:09.860of really wealthy people like there are multiple buildings named after family members and and that
00:31:15.520sort of thing so I think it's like important to kind of push back on these conversations of
00:31:22.160labeling people a racist like a noun which usually kind of paints them in that like one note like
00:31:27.700kkk literal like personification whereas we're talking about like oh no we understand that but
00:31:34.660realizing that white people just do benefit from white privilege and white supremacy yeah I saw a
00:31:42.420tweet by the writer Beck Shaw who's Australian who said that the Ellie Kemper thing is yet more
00:31:47.900evidence that you should just assume most people in comedy come from privileged backgrounds until
00:31:52.720proven otherwise I think this could have been a good debate about like privilege but it's just
00:31:58.180been kind of overtaken by the the internet discourse so i read a great piece on this
00:32:06.040whole thing by the writer charlie warzell's a writer for the new york times and it's a newsletter
00:32:12.580called the internet is flat three-dimensional human beings can't thrive in a one-dimensional
00:32:18.000space so they say the kemper event is an instance of context collapse happening on multiple fronts
00:32:24.460time audience at once there's a problematic group there's an event that happened 21 years ago with
00:32:31.380visual documentation there's a well-known but not a-list celebrity there's a random tweet i believe
00:32:37.820the user who kicked this off had roughly 800 twitter followers that gets some pickup and sends
00:32:43.220people digging around online these factors cause an old article to go viral like the 2014 one and
00:32:50.000leads Twitter's curation team to attempt to turn the conversation into something helpful.
00:32:55.920Also in this article is probably the first time I have ever agreed with Ben Shapiro. Never thought
00:33:02.740I would say that. But the quote reads, all of these questions reflect the nuances of a situation.
00:33:08.680And all of these questions are also irrelevant because the ecosystem in which the broader
00:33:13.880conversation is conducted flattens them all into nothingness. She is either a KKK queen or an0.82
00:33:21.460unfairly maligned cancer culture victim or some complicated muddle mix of the two which isn't0.97
00:33:27.540interesting enough to hold a headline and so is usually discarded in favor of one of the binary
00:33:32.720options. And so Kemper becomes the momentary main character of Twitter. Within minutes it ends up
00:33:39.240not being about Kemper at all. She's just the latest place filler in people's large cultural
00:33:44.400war. It looks like this. Quote Ben Shapiro, there is not a single iota of evidence that
00:33:50.480Ellie Kemper is racist. So naturally, Twitter is trending her and blue checks are calling her a1.00
00:33:55.680KKK princess. What absolute garbage? Of course, that piece will be linked in the show notes if1.00
00:34:01.180you want to read the whole thing. That was such a great article and I think it really taps into
00:34:05.200is something that's continuing to happen more rapidly and more frequently on Twitter and
00:34:11.240elsewhere. I also have an article I want to bring for show and tell. So it's called how Twitter
00:34:17.540turned Kimmy Schmidt into a KKK queen. And it was written by EJ Dixon for Rolling Stone. This will
00:34:24.420also be linked in the show notes. I'll just read out a snippet here. But it's worth asking exactly
00:34:31.000why certain incendiary conversations gained traction on social platforms over other more
00:34:36.620nuanced but arguably more valuable ones. It was easy to predict the cycle that would follow the
00:34:42.620Kemper story once she started trending on Twitter. Outlets would dutifully write up the controversy0.66
00:34:48.940for another 24 or 48 hours thus ensuring more people would tweet about it and then
00:34:55.000interest would plateau until a dubious photo or tweet from the next public figure came along.
00:35:01.000This is in effect exactly what happened and it will happen again and again and again until
00:35:07.480either we become more thoughtful about the content we consume and the narratives we choose
00:35:12.120to spread or platforms become more thoughtful about how they choose to package and promote